Ad libitum feeding of experimental animals is preferred because of medical relevance together with technical and practical considerations. In addition, ethical committees may require ad libitum feeding. However, feeding affects the metabolism so ad libitum feeding may mask the effects of drugs on tissues directly involved in the digestion process (e.g., jejunum and liver). Despite this effect, principal component analysis has the potential of identifying metabolic traits that are statistically independent (orthogonal) to ad libitum feeding. Consequently, we used principal component analysis to discover the metabolic effects of doxorubicin independent of ad libitum feeding. First, we analyzed the lipidome of the jejunum and the liver of rats treated with vehicle or doxorubicin. Subsequently, we performed principal component analysis. We could identify a principal component associated to the hydrolysis of lipids during digestion and a group of lipids that were orthogonal. These lipids in the jejunum increased with the treatment time and presented a polyunsaturated fatty acid as common structural trait. This characteristic suggests that doxorubicin increases polyunsaturated fatty acids. This behavior agrees with our previous in vitro results and suggests that doxorubicin sensitized the jejunum to ferroptosis, which may partially explain the toxicity of doxorubicin in the intestines.
Keywords: anthracyclines; lipidome; lipidomics; unsupervised analysis.